Today, more than half of the wholesalers and other businesses on the Hunts Point Terminal Market will meet at a community Chamber of Commerce to air their grievences over the tactics of the Business Integrity Commission, an obscure New York City agency that regulates the wholesale market in the South Bronx. Now the BIC is expanding its scope to include businesses located just outside the 113-acre facility.
Hunts Point receives thousand of truckloads of produce each week from across North America and around the world. It is the globe’s largest wholesale produce terminal.
About 30 of Hunts Point’s 42 businesses are expected to attend the CoC meeting. They are upset over BIC’s tactics, including a requirement that the companies’ employees—mostly low-wage, minority workers—complete an 11-page form that asks personal questions about the workers’ spouses, employment history and addresses over the past decade. The information is used to vet their eligibility to work at the companies, and there are significant fees associated with completing these forms.
“We see this as a violation of the employees’ civil rights,” Josephine Infante, president of the Hunts Point Economic Development Corp., told Crain’s in an online article published September 11. “People feel threatened.”
BIC, a law enforcement agency is focused on rooting out organized crime in the carting industry and public wholesale food markets and has had success in eliminating mob infiltration at the former Fulton Fish Market. But the agency is now at the center of a dispute between the city and the vendors over a plan to redevelop the market and ink a 30-year lease, Crain’s reports. The market, says BIC’s involvement in its operations is the chief reason it has not struck a deal and may move out of the city.
In 2009, legislation expanded the agency’s authority to wholesale businesses located in a defined geographic region beyond the walls of the meat, produce and fish markets. Hunts Point community leaders say BIC has recently ramped up its outreach in the area, and they are concerned that it will have a chilling effect on economic growth in the neighborhood.